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Sobanukirwa was launched to help people in Rwanda get access to information by allowing anyone to post requests for free via a website and to receive email alerts once information is released.

But as our team have carried out training sessions for citizens, government officers, NGOs, civil society groups and journalists across the country, we’ve found that very few people in Rwanda are aware of the existence of the country’s 2013 access to information law and the rights that it gives them.

So to help make sure everyone knows about their right to information in Rwanda, today we are launching an awareness campaign featuring two short videos in English and Kinyarwanda made by Rwandan animators.

The video aims to show how anyone in Rwanda from farmers to mothers to rural families all now have the legal right to ask questions to public and private bodies and to get answers within three days.

And because we know that the majority of Rwandans do not have access to the internet, we have also established 4636, a toll-free phone hotline that anyone can call or text if they have questions.

Our team will then submit those questions online and will call people back when their questions are answered to convey information to them. All you need to do is use this service is to call or text 4636 (‘INFO’ on your phone’s keypad).

We hope that this campaign will help spread awareness about access to information in Rwanda as well as making it even easier for people to ask the questions that they need answers to.

A year ago today, hundreds of public and private organisations in Rwanda should have proactively published a large amount of information online about how they are funded, who they employ, who subsidises their activities and how people can contact them to request more information.

Article two of Ministerial Order No 006/07.01.13 of 19/12/2013 determining in details the information to be disclosed gave all public and private organs six months to publish the 13 types of information listed in article three of the same order.

These information types included “the budget allocated to each department of the organ”, “the procedure followed managing organs in the decision making process” and “particulars of concessions, permits or authorizations granted by the organ”.

Team Sobanukirwa realise that many public and private organisations have failed to publish this information due to a lack of awareness about the access to information law and the ministerial orders.

Sobanukirwa publishes any information requests for all to see and making it very easy for citizens to submit new information requests. We have also met with many interested parties to explain to them what the access to information law says and how their organisations can make use of the law.

This demonstrates how useful improved access to information can be to help people in Rwanda learn more about how organisations work, get data on issues that they care about and discover more about how the country is run.

We call upon all public and private organisations in Rwanda to adhere to the law set out in the access to information ministerial orders and proactively publish all required information to help citizens learn more about their work in the country.

This is important to repeat as many people believe the law only applies to journalists but actually the law guarantees these rights for all citizens.

Thanks to the law, you have the right to ask for any information held by organisations covered by the law and the organisations are legally obliged to give you the information for free in the form that you requested.

You can ask for information “verbally, in writing, by telephone, internet or any other means of communication without prejudice to the provisions of [the access to information] law”.

Where can you read the access to information law and ministerial orders for yourself?

For the last two days, members of Team Sobanukirwa have been in Gisenyi talking about access to information, open data and data journalism at an event organised by Rwanda’s National Institute of Statistics.

The event was a great chance to share information and advice with journalists, statisticians, designers and civil servants from a wide range of organisations.

Migisha K. Claude talked about the coming data revolution that governments across the world are signing up to as they discuss the international sustainable development goals (SDGs). He also talked about the work he’ll be doing as the new open government fellow for Rwanda.

This is good news but we are working hard with official from different organisations to help information officers understand more about Sobanukirwa so that they can help the public get access to all the information that they need.

We also have dozens of users who have set up accounts on Sobanukirwa to track authorities. This means that Sobanukirwa will alert those users by email as soon as any information is requested or released by organisations they are interested in.

If you have any questions about Sobanukirwa and how our website can help you, please email us or send us a message on Facebook or Twitter.

Or you can watch the Rise and Shine Rwanda video below to learn more about Sobanukirwa and the work we are doing:

With help from Nathan Mugume, the information officer at the Ministry of Health, Mark was able to get hold of the information he needed and details of all these health care locations has now been added to healthsites.io.

This website is the brainchild of the Global Healthsites Mapping Project, an “initiative to create an online map of every health facility in the world”.

Thanks to Mark’s request, the health care location details are also available for anyone to download for free from the Sobanukirwa website in case this information is of use to other health-related projects in Rwanda.

We hope to see a lot more examples like this in the future where information requested and released via Sobanukirwa helps others to build useful websites or to help people to be more informed about Rwanda.

This funding will help our team to continue our work to spread awareness of access to information in Rwanda over the next year through holding public training sessions and setting up an SMS system for citizens to use to send in their queries.

It will also help us to make improvements to sobanukirwa.rw, the free access to information website we’ve co-created with the Open Democracy and Sustainable Development Initiative and in partnership with mySociety International.

The Indigo Trust is a UK based grant making foundation that funds technology-driven projects to bring about social change, largely in African countries.

We’re very excited about working with the Indigo Trust and want to thank them very much for their support.